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Flash CS5 Will Export iPhone Apps
HanClinto was among a number of readers to send word that Adobe has worked around the inability to run Flash on iPhones and iPod Touch devices. Adobe has been trying to work with Apple for more than a year to get its Flash Player software running on Apple's products, but has said it needs more cooperation from Apple to get it done. Now Adobe has come up with a work-around. At its Adobe Max developer conference in Los Angeles Monday, Adobe announced that the CS5 release of Flash Professional, due in beta later this year, will allow developers to write applications and compile the code to run on Apple devices. Getting these into the app store might be tricky, though.
Look in http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashcs5/appsfor_iphone/ They already show apps accepted into the store that were made by devs with prerelease versions of Flash CS5... I think this is cool as it will enable people skilled in Flash to stick to their tool of choice. I would love to see a comparison between developing the iPhone SDK and Flash.
There are already at least four apps on the store today that were built like this. This isn't Flash on the iPhone in any way - the apps are compiled into native iPhone applications. Does Apple have a rule somewhere that says all iPhone apps must be compiled with XCode?
It's attractive to people that only know Flash/Actionscript and don't have the time/desire/skill to learn Objective-C.
I fear just what kind of pre-existing crapware this will enable on the iPhone.
Android has full C/C++ support
They supply the standard C library, but they expose no other API whatsoever. In practice, this means you cannot do any input/output in C and it's use is limited to processor intensive logic.
http://monotouch.net/ .Net libs and get it running on the iPhone.
Monotouch provides a C# to ARM compiler and the ARM implementation of the .Net libs you might need.
Compile C# code written against
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The main reason Apple and Adobe fight over Flash is because Adobe doesn't want to do a complete rewrite of Flash for the iPhone and instead just wants to modify its Mac-version to run in Safari Mobile.
Apple however isn't content with this, because it's their opinion that Flash for Mac/iPhone takes up too much resources, which will harm the "browsing experience" and drain the battery.
Basically, Apple demands something better than Adobe is willing to develop.
Pretty good is actually pretty bad.
Whilst they are not a monopoly supplier of mobile phones they can do what they like.
Before a million 'oh noes runtime' posts. It doesn't use the flash runtime, it uses Apple's LLVM to convert the usual AS3 JIT runtime to being a compiled app. This is why it won't have any problems with the app store. The OP is wrong, and it's documented. As proved by the fact they have apps on the store. I just hope this gets Open Sourced so that we don't have to use the Flash IDE to do it.
my band is more brutal techno punk than yours
Paranoia is an irrational fear.
Apple strongly controlling apps is a business decision.
There's a difference.
It's one of many business decisions that makes up the iPhone ecosystem. Something which has been phenomenally successful. Consumers like the end result, and vote with their dollars.
Whilst Apple employees do make mistakes with edge cases of their rules, the rules themselves are not irrational. And Flash isn't an edge case.
...sign that horrid SDK license?
Do you still have to buy a hideously overpriced Apple machine to use as a dev box?
Flash (REAL, unchained and fettered, Flash) and Java do not exist on the iPhone for one simple reason: GREED.
If a complete Flash Player and Java are on the iPhone, everyone can develop for the iPhone without an SDK, everyone can publish/sell applications without the crApp Store.
I have no problem with a company making money off its products, but the lengths to which Apple disciples will go to justify the hideousness of its corporate behavior is only matched by their ability to ignore Apple's ridiculous prices.
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Thank god only AS3 is supported.
Although, most of what our company outputs is AS2, mainly because our primary clients have paranoid and backwards IT techs who refuse to update their flash players, or low-budget IT Depts who are still using Pentium IIIs.
Anything that'll give us some leverage to put AS3 into practice is well worth it
"Sure, you can have it on the iPhone, but only if you update your flash player on your PCs"
It pays to be obvious, especially if you have a reputation for being subtle.
Just because Flash is single threaded and thus can only choke one core of a dual core machine at a time doesn't mean it can't bring a 2.8 Ghz machine to it's knees. Just try watching one hulu movie in Safari in one window and load some particularly crappy flash game in firefox. Your machine is now unusable.
Adobe treats mac users as second class citizens thus treating many of their power users like dirt. If you think like Steve Jobs, this is an insult to Apple since they went and did want industry members like Adobe have long demanded of them and built a better OS than Windows (much better) and built really solid hardware, the iPod Touch/iPhone anyways, and then been plagued with monopolists like Adobe/Microsoft shutting them out. If history is a lesson, (think iWork) Apple will soon deliver a native version of Inkscape and dump resources into Pixelmator, and start bundling them with Final Cut studio and new iMacs (well a trial version in Pixelmator's case). Apple somewhat reasonably demands more, Adobe and Microsoft refuse to/can't deliver so Apple just raises the bar... this is capitalism at its best; even if the Google Voice fiasco is capitalism at its worst.
Number 1 rule to make sure something ships on Apple iPhone platform or even OS X is: Keep your mouth shut up about it. Especially if you do "workaround" kind of stuff. Look what they did to Google, Sun (ZFS).
This announcement will not serve anything rather than thousands of trolls and fanboys not knowing a single thing about "Flash lite" kind of things working perfectly on Symbian/Win MO talk how bad Flash is and how it will eat their battery.
They didn't understand the basic but secret reason about why a multimedia/app platform like Flash wasn't shipped with iPhone at first place. We, users have very good guesses.
If I sound paranoid, I ask you what happened to ZFS after Sun CEO blogged about it before SJobs was able to announce it with his genius PR. There are no traces of ZFS on Snow Leopard nor its server. It is amazing that $1 shareware app authors knows how to deal with Apple but multi billion Adobe which somehow owes its existence to Apple does such lame PR announcements.
Have fun with your "export to iPhone" menu option next year. Something tells me something will go wrong with the cunning plan.
I love how things not being supported is twisted to be a good thing - we've seen it before: 3G, MMS, video, copy/paste. That last one in particular, it's amazing the lengths people went to to justify how the UI was improved by not being able to do something as simple as copy/paste, by talking about "new paradigms" (but not ever explaining what those were).
The joke is that when the Iphone finally does add those new features, suddenly the argument that it was better off without them vanishes, and the news is accompanied with much hype and fanfare, as if it was the first phone to ever have such a feature.
I wish I thought of these tactics 10-15 years ago for the Amiga, when development for it was disappearing after Commodore's demise. "Why yes, it doesn't matter that AmigaOS doesn't have Java, in fact, that's a reason why it's better than Windows, because Java is horrible!"
It would be amazing if it was true. But it's not.
What people did say was that all the various suggestions that people here and on blogs were making for how to do the UI were shit. And that Apple would probably do cut'n'paste in a future version when they came up with a good UI for it. Which is exactly what happened.
HanClinto was among a number of readers to send word that Adobe has worked around the inability to run Flash on iPhones and iPod Touch devices. Adobe has been trying to work with Apple for more than a year to get its Flash Player software running on Apple's products, but has said it needs more cooperation from Apple to get it done. Now Adobe has come up with a work-around.
This does NOT let Flash content, as we know it, run on iPhone! For once in your miserable lives, editors, (and maybe submitters, too), READ THE DAMN ARTICLE! Last line of the first paragraph, IN BOLD: These aren't Flash SWF files, they're native iPhone apps.
Getting these into the app store might be tricky, though.
And I HATE this whiny editorializing BULLSHIT! Again from TFA, THIRD FUCKING PARAGRAPH, first sentence: As of today, participants in the Adobe pre-release program have submitted 8 applications and all of them have been accepted into the App Store.
Slashdot eds, this is the worst submission I've seen in a while. kdawson, do you know how to read, or click on a link?
For anyone who actually cares to know details, there's more info here.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Yes, I know. Until just last week I ran Ubuntu on a 2.8ghz machine, and believe me, I know how painful it is to hear your CPU fan spin up to max as you're watching a TV show that if you had pirated would take almost no system resources to run.
Adobe have basically announced a way to compile Flash to native iPhone apps. This should mean that all their future product releases that author Flash should hopefully have similar functionality. (I'm being selfish and thinking Flex here.)
The next logical step is for Adobe to allow you to deploy natively to other Phone OS. So as a Flex(read Flash, well AS3 ) developer I should be able to write an application, and then deploy to Air, browser, iPhone, Android, Symbian and Windows Mobile. Do you realise the impact on development time? Bug fixing each target environment suddenly becomes a non-issue. Time to market is massively shortened. This is huge.
I don't know if Adobe realise the potential for this. I know they were trying to get around Apple's intransigence, but I think they may have something exceptionally useful here.
your having problems with logic here but its quite simple, let me help you a bit.
for most people flash is a very good thing, for idiot zealots like you it isn't. flash continues to spread and grow in power.
the increasingly shrill voices of those like you
if you're stupid enough to buy a phone that drops 1/5 of all calls in nyc then they deserve what they get - a walled garden that nobody with half a brain would want to be in.
you just wait for html 5 with svg wundershow extensions /sarcasm.
Well I byte, young man.
Embedded devices have not the same resources available as desktop PCs have. CPU intensive tasks are often offloaded from the CPU to specialized hardware. Video and Audio en-/decoding is a good example for that.
Running a video player as separate application (which is by no means efficent) in another application just isn't going to help the cause (especially, if the same software performs already pretty bad on Desktop hardware).
NAtive video players can take advantage of the environment by default (be it hardware acceleration or desktop integration).
Apple might have an agenda, but if not I see plenty of technical reasons to rather not have flash on the iPhone (doesn't flash videos use h.264 for encoding which is certainly already supoorted on all apple platforms?).
I am still trying to figure out where my logic is flawed, you might be able to help me politely?
-S
>The way you write this, it sounds like something positive.
Well, it is both positive and negative. Personally, I *hate* what Flash does to web browsing, most of the time. It consumes tons of RAM, makes loading pages slow, eats bandwidth, eats CPU, lowers security, damages compatibility, restricts screen sizes, and most of all- makes animation while I am trying to READ.
And on a phone, it will drain the battery like no tomorrow.
But if they have the ability to turn it on/off or limit/control it's use, that will be the best of both worlds.
>Oh, an if you want video, there is a video player on the iPhone
Well, WebOS/Pre, Android, etc, they all have that- Youtube player, video player, stream player. This is about Flash 10.1 on a phone web browser.